Box took a big step towards finally becoming a publicy traded company on Monday, saying it plans to raise up to $250 million in an IPO.

The Los Altos-based company said in its filing that its revenue more than doubled in the year ended Jan 31 to $124.2 million when it posted a loss of $168.6 million.

The company warned against expecting to see it get out of the red any time soon, saying in a section on risk factors, "We do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future."

It also nodded to intense competition in the crowded collaboration and storage market, which includes Dropbox, Hightail, Citrix, EMC, Google and Microsoft: "Many of our competitors and potential competitors are larger and have greater name recognition, much longer operating histories, larger marketing budgets and significantly greater resources than we do."

The company was most recently reported to be valued at about $2 billion after raising $112 million from several Japanese investors to help fuel its international expansion in Asia.

It claimed it has 34,000 organizations paying to use its cloud-based storage and collaboration services and that it has 25 million registered users.

San Francisco-based Dropbox is reported to be valued at about $10 billion after recently raising $325 million of a planned $450 million funding round. Dropbox claimed late last year that it is being used by 4 million businesses, although it isn't clear how many of them are paying customers. It also said it has more than 200 total users.

Box has raised $431 million since it was founded by CEO Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith in 2005.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson owns the biggest stake in Box, according to the prospectus, with 25.5 percent of the shares. US Venture Partners is next largest, with 13 percent of the shares. Others with more than a 5 percent stake are General Atlantic with 8.4 percent; Scale Venture Partners, 7.4 percent; Bessemer Venture Partners, 5.6 percent and Meritech Capital Partners, 5.1 percent.

Related links:

Industries:

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.